by Ann Swinfen
When they came back to the kitchen the breakfast was cleared and washed up and Harriet was packing a big wicker hamper.
‘I really shouldn’t go off like this, with the house chores only half done,’ she said guiltily.
‘We’ll help with redding-up the house,’ Tirza hastened to reassure her. ‘Both of us.’
Patience Warren, the hired girl, did not work weekends. If her aunt started to worry about the state of her house and its tidiness ready for Sunday morning, they would never get away in time to join the party before it left for Gooseneck Lake. Tirza grabbed a couple of dusters, a broom and a mop, and pushed Simon ahead of her out of the kitchen. She reckoned they could give the place a flick round before her uncle finished in the yard. It might just pass muster if she could hurry her aunt through her inspection quickly enough.
Like all farm wives, Harriet spent her life battling with dirt. Although boots were always shed at the back door and fouled overalls were never allowed further than the kitchen and wash-house, the thin but persistent Maine soil worked its way indoors. In the dry periods of summer it swirled in on the air, a fine grey dust filtering through screen windows and doors, sloughing from the bodies of everyone who lived on the farm. In winter, minute scraps of hay and straw from the barns clung to clothes, drifted down on to carpets and lodged in the folds of loose covers and bedding. Yet determination – or Yankee cussedness – drove Harriet and the other women to demand immaculate standards of their own and their neighbours’ houses, just as it drove their husbands to struggle with the harsh climate and the unforgiving land.
They left the farm at eight o’clock, the four of them. Sam had shaken his head when invited to join the expedition. He smiled at Tirza.
‘Ain’t never skated since I was a boy. Ain’t got no skates, nor any wish to break my neck neither.’
He went back to a quiet pipe in his room over the horse barn, promising to start the evening milking on his own if they weren’t back in time.
‘Lord,’ said Tobias, ‘I’m not fixing on spending that long.’
‘Long way to Gooseneck Lake. Evenin’ settin’ in early. Don’t you worry, Mr Libby. I kin take my time and milk the whole herd if need be.’
Tobias had looped a string round the neck of a flagon of cider to make it easier to hold. Tirza wheeled her bicycle while Simon steadied the hamper on top of the saddle to save carrying it; she had tied her skates to the handlebars, and the rest of them wore theirs slung round their necks. The two cousins owned modern skates, screwed on to lace-up skating boots, but Harriet and Tobias still used old-fashioned runners with high, curved fronts, which had to be strapped on over their ordinary boots.
From the bedrooms of the farmhouse the ocean could be seen, though not the beach, but down here at ground level everything was hidden by the land until they reached the far end of the second field. In the snow-covered meadow to the right the cows moved slowly along the strip of clear grass against the dark curtain of the pine wood. One or two looked up as they walked past, and the warm breath flowed up from their nostrils and hung about their heads. The early morning wind had dropped altogether now, and if they stopped walking they could feel the harder frost setting in through the bones of their legs. Sam had turned out the two tough little plough-horses as well. Dancer and Lady cropped the thin winter grass without enthusiasm. They would be back in their barn by early afternoon – more tender creatures than cows, unable to stand so much cold. Both of them were in foal, due in a month or so.
‘Good thing we kept the horses, wasn’t it?’ said Harriet. ‘Now there’s a gasoline shortage, with the war.’
Tobias grunted. It had taken him years to save up for the John Deere tractor, which cost a frightening amount of money, and he had been like a boy with a new model train set when it arrived. He had wanted to get rid of the plough-horses, sell them on to some farmer who was stuck in the old ways and could not see how farming was going to change. But Harriet had disagreed, and she could be stubborn as a mule when she got an idea in her head.
‘What if the tractor breaks down in the middle of the ploughing season or during harvest?’ she had demanded. ‘A good horse doesn’t break down, so long as you look after it right. You have enough trouble with the Ford truck.’
He was no mechanic, Tobias knew that. It was this recollection that persuaded him to keep the horses, not the sentimental point that Harriet used to clinch her argument: ‘Dancer and Lady have given us years of good service. And we’re due at least one more foal from each of them. I’ll not see them go to someone who’ll drive them too hard and then send them to the knacker’s yard. When this terrible war is over, we can retire them. We’ve land enough to give them a decent old age.’
Lot of women’s nonsense. But he had to admit now that he was glad he had kept the horses. Since Pearl Harbor and the warnings about wartime shortages, he worried constantly whether he would have enough fuel, so he spared the tractor when he could. And it was true there was nothing quite like the thrill when a mare dropped a foal.
As they walked up the rise in the track at the far end of the second field, their boots crunching on last night’s new fall of snow, the ocean came into sight. It was the dark blue of slate, looking nearly black because of the low-lying sun in their eyes and the white dazzle of the snow-covered fields in front. Lines of breakers rolled in across its surface. From here they looked small, harmless. But if a lobsterman caught one of those great seas wrong, with all the weight of three thousand miles of running tide behind it, his boat could founder and sink in minutes.
To their right, a mile to the south, the straggling length of Todd’s Neck reached outwards. Narrow as a causeway where it joined the mainland, it bulged into a rounded end like a head where cliffs dropped sheer into the ocean. Its Abenaki name meant Head of the White Crane Bird, but it was called now after some seventeenth-century settler who had farmed part of the land and fished the seas there. His descendants had built ever grander houses until the last one, finished a hundred years ago, had beggared them, and they had moved south to the softer living of Massachusetts. The house was now a hotel patronised by wealthy financiers from New York and merchant families from Boston. Or had been until the grim years of the Depression, when it had been forced to lower its prices and accept a slightly more humble clientele – doctors, professors, lawyers. Flamboro had thought the Mansion House would be forced by the war to close its doors, at least in winter, but it was still functioning, and that meant work for girls of the village as chambermaids and waitresses, and jobs as bellhops or gardeners for sons who turned their backs on their fathers’ work of harvesting land or sea. There were young men in Flamboro who believed that a job at the Mansion House might start them on a road out of this isolated place, and lead to the wonders of Fifth Avenue and the Empire State Building. As far as Tobias knew, only one son of Flamboro had come near this goal. He was now running a diner for truck drivers somewhere on the freeway in New Jersey.
When the farm track reached the rock ledges sloping down to the beach, one branch turned right and followed the low shore south round the bay to Todd’s Neck, keeping to a ridge of solid ground above the marshes which filled the dip between the broken rocks and the pine woods. In the opposite direction the track turned north and climbed round the steep cliffs before dropping down to Flamboro in the next bay.
Beyond the neat stone wall that marked the northern boundary of the Libby farm lay an unkempt stretch of woodland. Not natural woodland, this. The woods on the next property had once been maintained, planted with specimen trees two centuries earlier and managed carefully – pruned and thinned and cleared to create a beautiful prospect from the great house and a pleasant retreat for ladies with wide skirts strolling there out of the sun.
The Tremayne place had been built the year after the English capture of Quebec had brought peace to these parts following the long devastation of the French and Indian wars, and the grounds had been laid out in the style of the latest English country houses of the
time. The Tremaynes had been powerful people in Flamboro and the surrounding country, although they spent only the summer months down Maine. Even in Tobias’s youth they had still pretty well run things. But one summer’s day in 1930 there had been a great stir of automobiles and the Tremayne family, father, mother, aunts, six children and lapdogs, had departed with their suitcases and their servants. The great gates, a mile and a half along the driveway which led inland to the Portland road, had been bound together with three chains, each secured by a padlock, and no one from the family had returned since. For a few years the Tremaynes’ manager had hired local women to spring-clean the house every May as if the family would be coming from Boston the way they had in the past. That practice had stopped seven or eight years ago, and the rumour was that he had not been paid a penny since the family left. Now the great house looked out blindly towards the ocean with its windows blanked by shades. The gardens had filled with wild briars and honeysuckle, and the fruit trees in the orchards threw out leaders like uncombed hair.
Tirza halted her bicycle just opposite the house and looked across the climbing layers of snow-filled terraces to the sweep of stone steps.
‘The Haunted House looks like a wedding cake today.’
Harriet made an impatient movement. All the children called it that, but it always made her uneasy.
‘Perhaps the Tremaynes will come back,’ she said. ‘I heard tell the eldest son is something to do with armaments now. The war might make them rich again.’
Tobias shook his head.
‘Never,’ he said firmly. ‘Nobody wants a place like that now. Mr and Mrs Tremayne might have come back, but now that he’s dead and she’s a poor bedfast creature, I doubt the next generation will ever use it.’
As they walked on, past the far end of the estate and down the steep ground to Flamboro harbour, Simon said under his breath to Tirza, ‘I know a way into the house.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do so. I’ll take you if you want. If you aren’t scared. It’s full of stuff, you know. Furniture with sheets over it like shrouds, and bags hanging from the ceilings, and creaking floorboards, and dark portraits leaning out at you watching from the walls.’
Tirza knew he was only trying to scare her.
‘OK, we’ll go. Maybe when it’s some warmer, though. It’d be perishing now.’
Outside Tirza’s house on the waterfront a group was gathering. Twenty or thirty people, adults and children, were milling about with baskets of food. They wore layers of warm clothing and thick boots. Five-year-old Joey Harris, who lived next door to Tirza, was so padded with sweaters and snowsuit that his arms stuck straight out from his sides. Her grandmother Abigail came down the steps and handed a chip basket covered with a red and white checked cloth to Nathan Libby.
‘There’s plenty of food in here, son,’ she said, eyeing Harriet’s basket sideways. ‘No need for you and Tirza to share your brother’s dinner.’ She turned to Harriet as if noticing her for the first time. ‘Good day to you, Harriet. You’re never going skating?’ She sounded faintly scandalised.
‘Good day, Mother Libby,’ said Harriet calmly. ‘Ayuh, I’m going to keep an eye on things and make sure no foolish child skates on thin ice. And I’ll see that everyone keeps warm and well fed.’
Abigail, outflanked, retreated backwards up the three steps, which gave her the advantage of height over the rest of them.
‘Well, Tobias,’ she said reprovingly, ‘I never thought to see you neglecting the farm for this sort of nonsense.’
Tobias looked aside and muttered something about what was the use of having a hired man?
Nathan took charge.
‘Come along now, folks. If we stand gossiping all day we’ll not get to Gooseneck Lake in time to do any skating. We’ll be back by nightfall, Mother.’
With that he ushered the party ahead of him along Shore Road, the main street of Flamboro, past Flett’s Stores. They turned left along Schoolhouse Lane, which led uphill and inland over a shoulder of Mount Manenticus where a track branched off through the pine woods above the town. Gooseneck Lake lay within the woods, a five-mile walk ahead of them.
By the time they reached the lake the sun was well up. They had been walking for more than an hour through the woods. Even in the sharp winter cold the scent of spruce and balsam firs hung in the air, a whisper of the heady perfume of hot midsummer days. Beneath the shelter of the trees and walking briskly they felt almost warm. This was old woodland. A strip of snow lay along the open ground of the path, splitting the wood like a white ribbon, but many of them walked alongside under the edges of the densely packed trees where no snow lay. Their feet made no sound in the centuries-deep fall of pine needles.
Coming out from the trees they stood at one end of the lake, which stretched out in a long curve, lying westwards and then disappearing behind the woods to the north-west. As far away as they could see, the lake was hard frozen, and the ice gave back a deep ring as Charlie Flett pounded it with a heavy branch. A mile away, though, where the lake curved north, the water became suddenly deep, plunging down into a vast hole that was said to be bottomless. In summer there was the menacing spiral of a whirlpool here in the elbow of the lake. This was where the ice might be half-formed and dangerous.
Mary Flett and Harriet began clearing a place under the edge of the trees and unpacking food while some of the men gathered fallen branches for a fire.
‘Heard any news of your Martha lately? Has Will been posted overseas yet?’ asked Mary, spreading a gingham cloth and laying out butter and cranberry loaf from her basket.
‘We had a letter this week. They’re back in married housing just outside Washington again, but she doesn’t know how long they’ll be there. Will has been moved three times in the last three months. I don’t know how she can live like that, after growing up on the farm and always knowing where she was.’
‘I don’t suppose,’ said Mary carefully, ‘that Will knows whether he’ll be sent overseas? Our Pete doesn’t have any idea where his ship will have to go.’
Harriet laid out knives and forks in precise lines and did not look up.
‘Well, I reckon most of the airmen will be sent to Europe,’ she said, ‘or more likely out to the Pacific, won’t they? That’s where they’re needed. The Japs seem to be spreading out everywhere, just wiping out our boys on all those queer-sounding islands.’
Mary pressed her fingers against her lips.
‘I’ve told Martha,’ said Harriet, ‘if Will has to go overseas she should come back with Billy and live with us. It’s best to be with your own family in times like these.’
‘Will she come?’
‘I reckon so. She probably wouldn’t have, if they’d still been in their first married housing. That was a better neighbourhood and she made plenty of friends there. But now all the service families are scattered and she doesn’t like this apartment they’ve been given. Six floors up and nowhere for Billy to play. And when the hot weather comes she’ll want to get out of Washington anyhow, with the polio they have there every summer.’
Harriet sighed.
‘Of course we hope that Will won’t have to go overseas, but it’s almost certain, isn’t it?’
‘At least Simon is too young to be drafted,’ said Mary. ‘That’s one bit of good luck.’
Peter was her only child, engaged to the new young schoolteacher. Charlie had hoped to take him into partnership in the store now he had finished his business course in Augusta.
Harriet knew she was lucky.
‘I’m sure Pete will be all right,’ she said awkwardly, not looking at Mary. ‘These new warships – they’re almost as big as a small town. It’s not like going to sea in a lobsterboat or a trawler.’
Involuntarily her eyes turned to her brother-in-law. Nathan might just be young enough to be drafted, if the war lasted any time at all. But fishermen would be draft exempt, like farmers, surely? And him with that child to bring up on his own. Abigail might live w
ith them and keep house, but Tirza needed her father. Even if he did treat her more like a son than a daughter.
Tirza sat apart from the others on a tussock of rough grass by the edge of the lake. In the summer her feet would have dangled into the water here, but now they were stretched out in front of her, the heels of her skate blades resting on the ice. From this low angle of sight she could see patterns of colour wavering across the ice, glints of blue and sparks of orange. Grabbing hold of the long grass in each hand and drawing her legs under her, she pushed off, shooting straight away from the shore and rising to her feet as she moved. She loved to skate. It was the one thing that made the long bitter months of winter endurable. In summer the days never seemed to last long enough, when she helped her father with his lobster traps, or tended her own crab-lines, or sailed her catboat, or roamed the pine woods with Simon, or helped on her uncle’s farm. But the snow-bound Maine winters meant hours of boredom indoors. The days of winter frustration seemed to choke Tirza until she became irritable and rude, defying Abigail and sometimes feeling her father’s belt across her backside. Abigail didn’t hold with anyone reading books or playing solitaire, however long and empty the snow-laden winter evenings. People discovered lounging around with a book or cards in their hands had better be given something useful to do pretty quick, whether it was scouring pans or knitting bait bags for the lobster pots.
